Kaite O'Reilly |
| Kaite O'Reilly with Phillip Zarrilli and Theatre Asou- Speaking Stones , Graz, Austria , October 10, 2002 |
| If you want to see the full range of work by Wales’ cutting-edge playwrights, you’re probably used to going a bit further afield. This time you would have to go a little further than usual: Graz in Austria, to be precise. Here, Kaite O’Reilly has been collaborating with American Director Phillip Zarrilli (who also has a studio in West Wales)and the Austrian company Theatre Asou to create Speaking Stones. It is a montage of images, voices and fragments which describes its subject as “that which comes after…” It requires the full journey of the evening to understand what this means. The show opens with a sung lament, and a stage divided by laboriously built dry stone walls. We could be in rural Wales or the mountains of Greece. One of the walls comes crashing down covering the stage with stones, and a farmer’s son remembers the harshness of the land. Gradually we meet characters whose lives are rooted in this landscape and in the fruit of the land: stones, which are transformed by the love and tenderness the performers lavish on them. As they move across the rubble, creating images that remind us of the wars of the twentieth century, we seem to be in many places at once, but the sense of dispossession, of being uprooted is the most immediate and powerful impression. Marching songs, poems, lullabies and the terse communications of soldiers provide the score for a dance of transformations as the performers leave their human characters behind becoming abstract shapes, ‘zeros’ and finally stones, like those they hold. The power of these transformations is their ability to resonate with a multiplicity of interpretations, which never stray into the gratuitously beautiful, are always rooted in a place and a sense of belonging. At one and the same time these people are earth and human, living on their land and being evicted, surviving and being ethnically cleansed, possessing and being dispossessed. Credited as both writer and dramaturg, Kaite O’Reilly and her collaborators offer powerful political theatre, which defies aesthetic categories and reminds us of our humanity. Perhaps unsurprisingly the work has not been well received in Austria where right-wing nationalism is on the rise, and the issue of asylum seekers is even more fraught than it is here. It is an understatement to say that this is a great shame, as it might mean that the work does not get seen elsewhere in Europe, another stone in the wall of insular, parochial nationalism which the work so elegantly demolishes. “that which comes after…” may be survival, or it may mean joining the stones in the field. The choice is left to us. It seems unlikely that you will get to see this work….I hope this has offered you a fragmentary sense of its power and immediacy. |
Reviewed by: Bill Hopkinson |
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